Reefs and Grief

In doing research for my post about Art Modell and Ralph Wilson I stumbled across something that I thought was pretty interesting. Part of Cleveland Municipal Stadium, which once sat where the new Cleveland Browns Stadium now is, was thrown into Lake Erie.

About 150,000 tons of concrete rubble was formed into three reefs that are now popular spots for fish and, as a result, fisherman. I thought that was a pretty innovative use for rubble.

If you’re on Twitter you probably follow Dadboner, a feed that chronicles the fictional Karl Welzein as he endures a litany of Michigan-style debauchery. Even if you know who is behind the feed, there’s still something highly entertaining about it.

If you’ve ever wondered how the feed started but don’t feel like scrolling endlessly through thousands of tweets to get there, here’s a handy day-by-day collection of Karl’s life story. You know, if you ever get bored.

If you like sports video games, you’re going to like that video a whole lot. There’s even a brief Mogilny sighting midway through.

I think Charles P. Pierce is one of the best political writers in America, so it’s nice to see him poking sports with a stick in his spare time at Grantland.

His meticulous writing style deconstructs arguments with ease and he has a knack for getting to the point in a hurry, something very rare in the superlative-filled world of sportswriting. This piece about Roger Goodell was excellent, if only for this breakdown of the NFL’s stance on player safety:

As to Goodell’s clumsy assertion that the research partially funded by the NFL will “make everything safer, including our military,” well, the unsolvable problem Goodell has is that he runs a hyper-profitable entertainment entity that depends vitally on the destruction of the human body for a substantial part of its entertainment function. There is simply nothing Goodell can do to change that, and asserting that his league’s dilatory efforts to make that destruction less inevitable — while, at the same time, fighting hard against a whole stack of lawsuits being brought by former players who are living twilight lives because of the destruction in question — will somehow benefit the troops makes Goodell sound silly. The comparison is morally chaotic. People who join the military risk their lives because what they do is considered essential to the survival of a nation. NFL players, for all the macho talk about “going to war” that you hear, do not make that same bargain. What they do is considered essential to a football league. It is not the same thing at all.

Despite struggling to maintain the moral high ground in player safety in the face of scab referees that continue to embarrass the league in grand fashion, football chugs along. That’s some machine you’ve got there, Rog.

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In this episode, Ryan is joined by Paul of Hockey Rhetoric. The pair discuss the impending NHL lockout, while Paul puts forth his own proposal to end lockouts and strikes forever. They also discuss steroids and performance enhancing in sports and why baseball is different from other sports when it comes to public perception of cheating.